Alfred Hitchcock | Rear Window / 1954

the prisonhouse of love

 

John Michael Hayes (screenplay), Alfred Hitchcock (director) Rear Window / 1954

 

For many of the years since I first saw Alfred Hitchcock’s brilliant film, Rear Window, I had concluded—along with most of the commentators on that film—that the work was primarily about voyeurism, about a society of voyeurs, about a particular voyeur (L. B. Jefferies/James Stewart), and about the way voyeurism plays a role in the making and watching of films themselves. There is a kind of perversity about the work, and the fact that, as some commentators had noted, the “murderer” suddenly turns the tables, crashing out of the frame to attack Jefferies for the invasion of his privacy, allows one easily to characterize Hitchcock’s film, like his later Vertigo, as a study in psychosis: that of character and audience alike.

    Of course, everyone recognizes that there are important aspects to the film that take it in adventuresome and comic directions—such as the strangely distant relationship of Jefferies and Lisa Fremont (Grace Kelly) and Lisa and Stella’s (Thelma Ritter) involvement with Jefferies’ voyeurism. But the film long seemed to me a frightening statement on society’s passive psycho-sexual propensities.

     Increasingly over the past few years, however, I have felt that I was missing something in perceiving the movie only in this way. The writing by John Michael Hayes, for example, is quite remarkably clever. And, despite the darkness of its overall concerns, there is more comedy in this work than in almost any Hitchcock film other than The Trouble with Harry.

     Recently in revisiting the film, I observed that, despite Jefferies’ vocation as a photographer—an accident in connection with his photography is why he stuck in the two-room apartment—he does not actually use his camera for the usual purposes. We do discover that he has taken photographs (he has pictures of the garden and comments on having taken “leg art” of the young woman across the way), but as audience we see him use the camera only as a kind of telescope—and, later, as the murderer comes calling, as a flash device to temporarily ward off attack.

     It is obvious, indeed, that Jefferies is nearly impotent with his leg in a cast: he cannot, metaphorically speaking, use his “tool,” the tool of his trade. Similarly, he cannot be sexually stimulated by one of the most beautiful and well-dressed women in the world—Lisa Fremont. As Stella observes, he can’t even get a temperature—he is symbolically and, apparently, literally frigid, despite the heat wave disturbing all the other tenants and his visitors.

    Moreover, he himself is in camera, trapped in a room not unlike a judge’s chambers—where he is judged as a failure by both his nurse and would-be lover. Like the camera he uses he now exists in a kind of black box from which he cannot escape, and which, in turn, forces him to look outside of his own self and space.

    It becomes quite apparent early in the film that L. B. Jefferies has no life other than that of nomadic observer of things. Like many American boy-men (a phenomenon on which I have commented elsewhere) he finds any suggestion that he “settle down” to be an unpleasant alternative he has no intention of accepting. His and Lisa’s witty discussion of “here” and “there” is almost a treatise on the kind of meaningless life he has lived: she, the healthy sexual beauty, ready to offer up her body as a “free mount,” is all “here,” while Jefferies is only “there,” anywhere but where love and social engagement exist.

    Through the accident of his being laid up, Jefferies is forced to view what is around him; and that consists of various sexual and societal possibilities. Rather than focusing, as do most critics, on the window of the “murderer”—which takes the movie in the direction of the murder mystery genre which, argues one critic, Hitchcock settled on after presenting the possibility of others—it might be useful if we were to first consider the various tableaux presented to his major character.

     There is the single, hard-of-hearing sculptor, a creative spirit who lives rather nicely by herself. But Hitchcock and, by extension, Jefferies presents her as a busybody. In this rear window tableaux, her satisfaction is the exception.

     The woman living above her, Miss Torso, a shapely young girl who parties each evening, is seen by Jefferies as offering up, almost like a prostitute, her sexuality. Lisa perceives her, rather, as “juggling wolves,” not at all interested in any of the men surrounding her each night. Ultimately, we discover that Lisa is right, for Miss Torso is delighted upon the return of her rather unattractive soldier boy.

      Nearby lives “Miss Lonelyheart,” a middle-aged woman who, unlike the sculptor, is not at all happy being alone; she sets the table for two and play-acts a visiting guest. At one point, when she actually brings home a stranger, his sexual advances force her to demand he leave, and she is left unhappily alone again. Both Stella and Jefferies are terrified that she may attempt suicide.

    A composer, whom both Stella and Lisa admire, is described by Jefferies as a man living alone who “probably had a very unhappy marriage”; later he describes him as “getting it” (the topic is inspiration, but the subtext is sex) mostly from his landlady.

    Also across the way a couple, to escape the heat, sleep on their balcony in full view of all, which clearly suggests that they do not have much of a love life; their major activity centers around hoisting their dog up and down into house and yard by means of a small basket, and when the dog is killed by the murderer, their grief is broadcast to all the neighbors.

    A young married couple who briefly appear at another window spend days in bed apparently enjoying the sexual bliss of new matrimony. Jefferies similarly scoffs at their behavior.

     Indeed, Jefferies is almost prudishly critical of all these individuals and their relationships with others.

     But it is the “murderer” Lars Thorwald and his wife who most clearly represent what the observant prisoner perceives as the standard condition of a relationship—a nagging and bed-bound wife driving her seemingly patient salesman husband to distraction—and ultimately, of course, to murder.

     In short, because of his enforced entombment in his “plaster cocoon,” because of his temporary “imprisonment,” (Stella claims in the very first scene to know that there is going to be “trouble” and that her patient will wind up in the New York state prison Dannemora), Jefferies, locked in a prison of his own making, is forced to encounter the “here,” the world of societal and sexual interrelationships. Despite the difficulty Lisa has in getting him to “mount,” and to climb the symbolic mountain of her love, the “adventurer” must give up all action before he can discover how to behave. If he has previously lived only as a voyeur, as someone who clicks and snaps images of reality, he is now forced to truly observe and encouraged to involve himself in the world.

     Of course, there is also a price to be paid for that involvement. Since he cannot function and cannot enter the world, Lisa enters it for him, endangering her own life. Lisa’s illegal entry into the Thorwald’s apartment and her discovery of the wife’s wedding ring forces Jefferies to perceive his failures. As Lisa slips on the ring to prevent Lars Thorwald from discovering what she has found, she has, symbolically speaking, married him. And in that act, Jefferies is made to recognize another alternative to the possibilities of social involvement he has witnessed.

       Observing Lisa and Jefferies’ rear window communication, however, Thorwald, like Thor, the ancient god of thunder (Jefferies first observes his neighbor behaving suspiciously during a thundering downpour), takes action, threatening the very body of the observer-witness, an act that ends in Jefferies’ defenestration, his literal fall—a fall not just out of his isolation and into the “here,” but a falling into love and sexual being. The movie ends with Jefferies comfortably asleep (something he has been unable to do throughout much of the movie) aside Lisa who, reading an adventure-travel book, puts it aside to pick up a fashion magazine.

     Given these perceptions about this movie, I see Rear Window now less as a study in cultural psychosis than as a comedy of social interrelationships, a comedic playing out of various sexual-social combinations that allow our “hero” to move from his child-like isolation to an adult social and sexual being.

     Most of the perversity associated with this film, accordingly, seems to have less to do with the major character’s careful observation of his neighbors—something he points out, that they also can do to him—than it does with a failure to recognize that the often frightening but essentially comic sexual and social encounters he watches are those of normal human beings—of us all.

 

Los Angeles, April 6, 2005

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2005), and My Year 2005: Terrifying Times (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2006)